Chapter 11
Chapter 11
G ertie’s excellent mood lasted five seconds after she told her mother, and saw her face.
“Is it because I told people you were taking the airline job?” Jean said, tears threatening to overspill her thick black eyelashes.
“No,” said Gertie. “No. Honestly. It’s time. You know it is. I thought you’d be happy.”
“I know I said it was,” Jean replied glumly. She looked down. She had meant to be more encouraging to Gertie, of course she had. It was just, with Gertie not getting her exams... then the job had been so nice, just being down the road from the salon... and everyone said, ah kids, they mature later these days, then the pandemic had come along, and...
“Plus,” said Gertie. “Don’t you think it’s time for you to be getting out there again too? You don’t need your grown-up daughter cramping your style.”
“All men are dickheads though. Have we all taught you nothing?” Jean bit her trembly lip.
“Oh, Mum,” Gertie sighed. “Oh, you’re right. You know, I should stay. Absolutely loads of people wanted the room.”
She glanced into the cozy yellow sitting room where the fire was crackling. Elspeth looked up from where she was watching EastEnders with the subtitles on, and knitting a huge orange open-stitch scarf on giant needles, which meant she didn’t need a different pair of glasses for seeing her knitting and reading the TV.
“What are you saying?” Elspeth called out.
Jean and Gertie looked at each other.
“I’ll tell her,” said Gertie.
“She’ll be fine about it.” Jean nodded.
But suddenly Elspeth froze.
“What... what?”
Her needles fell from her hands. The women darted forward.
“Mum?” said Jean, leaping over. “Mum, are you all right?”
“I...” Elspeth looked around as if she wasn’t exactly sure where she was. Her leg started to tremble and Gertie carefully walked her over to the sofa, laid her down, and grabbed one of their home-knitted blankets to keep her warm.
“Mum?”
“Grandma?”
Gertie picked up her phone and dialed 999; her grandmother’s mouth had fallen weirdly to one side and her eyes still weren’t focused. Her hand was shaking so much she could barely dial the number.
T HE PARAMEDICS, ALTHOUGH they took a while to come, were completely and utterly brilliant. They were jolly, if anything; certainly practical. A man and a woman, dressed in green, they bustled in as if this was quite normal, which of course to them it was.
Gertie had calmed herself down then googled what to do and had done it, to the letter. She had made her grandmother lie down on her side on the sofa, with a bowl to her right in case she vomited; had refused to let Elspeth have anything to drink even though Jean thought she should attempt some tea. Gertie sat next to her grandmother, checked her breathing, and kept her talking. She took her grandmother’s hand. Their hands were exactly the same shape: small palms, longer fingers. Gertie’s nails were neat and rounded and short; Elspeth’s were polished with hard burgundy nail polish chipping at the corners. The backs of Elspeth’s were a network of raised veins, soft pastry skin, brown spots. Gertie stared at her grandmother’s hand for a long time. Her own hand would look like that one day, she thought. Her hand would turn into that hand. Although without another hand to squeeze it further down the line.
She always thought she had so much time to do what she wanted to do. Now she was holding a hand that was trembling and terrified and must, once, have looked exactly like her own... It must have happened so fast. In the blink of an eye. Just as she had felt when she saw Morag and Nalitha; ten years from school had flashed past. Did it all flash past then? And one day your hands were coiled, and there was fear in your eyes and you were waiting for an ambulance.
“Okay, let’s be having you,” said the handsome male paramedic. “What do you prefer: Mrs. Mooney or Elspeth?”
Elspeth blinked, but seemed to focus. “Elspeth.”
“That’s great! Good girl!”
His companion rolled her eyes. “You won’t believe,” she said, “how many female patients show remarkable powers of recuperation when he turns up. Some of them go and put their nighties on .”
“Is he single?” asked Jean in a voice not quite quiet enough, as the male paramedic took Elspeth’s pulse. Gertie had had to extricate her hand. She could feel her grandmother’s cool imprint still.
“Muuuuum,” whined Gertie. “How is this the time?”
“Good job—paramedic,” Jean cooed.
“Excuse me,” the male paramedic spoke without looking up from his stopwatch. “I’m gay as a window and married, thank you.”
“You should just get a badge that says that,” muttered the fe male paramedic. “Meanwhile I am single, actually. And every man I meet is 106 or is dangerously bleeding out.”
“I can see how that would be difficult,” said Jean. The male paramedic stood up and the women all looked at him expectantly.
“Strong as an ox, you are, Elspeth,” he said. “I don’t think I want to take you in. Unless you want to go in?”
Elspeth shook her head firmly. She was sitting up now and didn’t look nearly as dreadful as she had a moment or two before. Gertie pulled the blanket closer round her.
“Hospitals are cathedrals of death,” she mumbled. “Everyone knows that.”
“Well, they’re...” The female paramedic screwed up her face.
“Well, they’re not holiday camps.” The man took out a syringe.
“I’m going to give you this injection,” he said. “Which should stop it happening again, or another event like that damaging you long-term. I’m not a doctor so I can’t say for sure, but this looks like a very mild ischemic event. Like a small stroke, but don’t get scared by that word—they’re very common. You’ll need to go and get checked out and let the GP run some tests in the morning—but honestly if we took you in now, the hospital couldn’t do the tests till then anyway.”
“And Love Island is coming on,” said Elspeth.
“Well, exactly,” replied the paramedic. “And it’s Casa Amor.”
He rolled down her sleeve as Gertie took the female paramedic aside.
“Is she going to be okay?”
“I can’t say,” replied the woman. “But if we were seriously worried we would take her in. I mean, I can take her in but she might be waiting for a bed for a really long time, and there’s still Covid about and, honestly, I think she’d be a lot better off here at home until the morning. If it was my grandmother, you know?”
Gertie nodded. “Okay, good.”
“You did everything right,” said the woman, approvingly. “We’ll write it up and phone your GP first thing in the morning. They’ll get her up for tests.”
Gertie bit her lip. “When this kind of thing starts happening though...”
The woman smiled, sadly, and Gertie could see in her eyes how tired she was. “She’s... she’s not young.”
“No,” said Gertie. “I suppose she isn’t.”
“But,” added the woman, “honestly—well done. You’d be amazed at how many people go to pieces when something like this happens. But you were completely calm.”
A FTER THE PARAMEDICS had gone, Jean made them tea and put a little bit of whisky in for shock. Gertie protested and remade Elspeth another one without any whisky in it at all, then Elspeth protested so she ended up with a tiny dash and, by this time, stone-cold tea.
The KCs arrived in force by 9 p.m. Gertie hadn’t even told anyone; possibly someone had spotted the sirens and word had got around, or possibly there were deeper, older signals to a powerful coven of women feeling the pull of one of their number being in trouble.
“It’s like the bat signal,” said Gertie as she opened the door. “Only with crochet hooks.”
Between them all, they put Elspeth to bed, making sure they checked on her every five minutes, until she told them, in a voice that started off querulous but now had an air of command to it, that they had to stop it or she wasn’t going to get a wink of sleep. Then they convened an emergency council, organizing who was going to take her in the morning, and who was going to sit when and who was going to handle making all the shepherd’s pie Elspeth was going to need to convalesce.
Gertie removed herself from the room—the whisky was being shared around again—and went and sat with Elspeth, who although fed up of seeing everyone else was perfectly happy to see her darling granddaughter. In fact, she tried to sit up as Gertie entered with an extra cup of tea, just in case. Elspeth waved it away; she absolutely didn’t want to be getting up to go to the toilet in the pitch-black middle of the night more than was absolutely necessary. Her biggest relief was that she hadn’t wet herself when that nice ambulance man had turned up. Old age was even less fun than everyone had warned her it was going to be.
“Hey, mo grabh ,” she said. Gertie sat down, enjoying the silence. Next door the rabble were rather leaning into the fuss and drawing up a night rota.
“It’s all gone a bit dramatic next door,” Gertie said.
“I know,” replied Elspeth. “Well, good. I’m glad everyone is flying into action and having a lovely time.”
“Was it scary?”
The old hand clasped at her.
“So scary,” her grandmother whispered, a tear dropping from her eye onto the pillow. Gertie grabbed a tissue from the box by the bed, and tenderly wiped Elspeth’s eyes with her other hand.
“I felt... so small,” said Elspeth. “As if... as if...” She took a loud shuddering breath. “I don’t feel...” she started again.
“Don’t talk, Gran. Not if you’re tired.”
Elspeth shook her head. “No. I’m fine. This is important. You have to know... when it happened...”
“Uh-huh.”
“I thought that might be it. I thought that was it. For me.”
“Well, you’re in your own bed now, so the medical people obviously don’t think so.”
“No,” said Elspeth. “Not this time. But what I have to tell you is important.”
Gertie tilted her head. “What’s that?”
“You have to know,” Elspeth said carefully, her pale skin creased with the effort, “that I don’t feel eighty-four. I don’t feel it at all. I feel your age. Inside. You never get any older. You can’t believe it’s all gone, and all those years have gone past. You think it can’t possibly be me . Getting old happens to other people, but it won’t happen to me . But it does. Suddenly you turn around and all the summers and Christmases have smooshed all the gither, and some days I’ll see a woman holding her new babby, and I’ll feel strange because Jeanette isn’t still in my arms, and you aren’t either. Because two minutes ago, you were.” She sighed. “And now it feels like... I’m being asked to leave the stage. Like my turn is over. Even if it’s not over quite yet, there’s nothing new coming. No new act, or bit where I get to start over, make different choices.
“And it doesn’t feel fair. It isn’t the least bit fair, even if you don’t die young, and I’m old. But it still doesn’t feel anything like enough. For all the things you want to do and all the places you want to go and... I never went anywhere. And I never thought I wanted to. I have absolutely loved my life. I was happy here. I just want more of it, that’s all.
“And what I would say to you is, don’t wait. Go places. I think... I don’t know. Jean never wanted to go anywhere. But I think you might like it. Who knows? But you should. Get away. Travel. Have fun. Because in a blink of an eye... you will be very very old, like me, and you won’t be quite sure how you got here.”
This was a very long speech from her grandmother. But it felt like exactly what she had thought the first time she’d picked up her grandmother’s hand. Gertie nodded fervently.
“Now, go and let an old lady sleep,” Elspeth said. “I promise not to die on you quite yet. And anyway it’ll be a day out, going up the big hospital. They’ve got a nice restaurant.”
Gertie kissed her on top of her head and went back to the still fairly lively group next door, thoughtfully. She had to check though.
“Mum,” she said. “Do you want me to stay for Grandma?”
Jean shook her head vehemently. “Exactly the opposite,” she said. “You have to go. You really have to go. I’m being selfish.”
Gertie nodded. “Then I am going to go. And I am going to think seriously about the job.”
And Jean kissed her daughter full on the forehead.
“Good. Plus, I have a new consignment of mohair showing up and I’m going to need the entirety of that room.”